Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux
tauonite@lemmy.world 20 hours agoAll AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what ‘opt-in’ means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That’s unambiguous.
Sounds like they will be opt in, not opt out
I don’t see why there is a big outrage. Sure I’m not a fan of the AI features and I certainly will disable them but it’s tot like they’re forced upon me. Some people like (want) AI in the browser and good for them. For me, it doesn’t change my experience at all
(Commented this separately on purpose)
Come to think of it, I do enjoy the translation feature in Firefox
The alt-text tagging is pretty amazing according to my sister (blind), too.
I’ve been thinking the same thing. The online tech community is a very small part of a much larger pie and they need to serve multiple audiences. As long as it can be turned off and truly be off, who cares?
People don’t trust that it can be truly turned off and that it won’t act maliciously in some way. That’s really the crux of the whole saga. We’re at a point where phone companies are getting survey results that say that 80% of users either don’t care about AI nor use it or find that it actively makes their user experience worse.
Did those people forget this is am open source browser and they can actually check it’s doing what it says it’s doing?
And if they’re that paranoid that they don’t trust the pre-compiled binaries, they can just compile them themselves.
This discussion is completely absurd to me.
rainwall@piefed.social 20 hours ago
No, go deeper into that thread.
The dev has a really hinky defention of “opt-in” thats basicslly “yes we push all this on by default and realize it will be the nirm for most of our users because of that, but you technically dont have to interact with it so thats opt-in.”
tauonite@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I mean yeah, that’s a fair point, and the dev said that themselves, that the definition of opt in is ambiguous. The definition they seem to use is that AI won’t run unless you explicitly tell it to, and I think that’s ok. There’ll be a button that you can press to do some AI action and you can hide it using the kill switch.
I do hope the kill switch isn’t hidden behind 5 layers of menus
rainwall@piefed.social 19 hours ago
Thats not ambuguity. AI will be opt out in firefox, which is them abandoning core principles like user choice and privacy.
They can do that, but playing like they arebt by redefining well established term in UI/UX to try to hide the fact that they are is disengenious, and cuts right through the “we will earn your trust back” messaging made by the same dev.
tauonite@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I think it’s quite clear there’s ambiguity (hence this discussion). How would you define opt in? Should a user not even see the button for an opt in feature?
hikaru755@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
A feature that will not do anything unless you explicitly press a button to start using it is quite literally opt-in, though? Opt-in doesn’t mean “I won’t even know the feature exists without hunting through the settings”. It just means that it won’t start doing things without your consent. Presenting a way to provide that consent in a more visible place than buried deeply in the settings does not make it opt-out. It might be a bit annoying to you, but it has no effect on your user choice or privacy, especially if there’s a way to globally hide it and any other features like it, including new ones that might be added in the future.
mirshafie@europe.pub 8 hours ago
Let’s have a look at how it works now, so we don’t need to speculate.
When I configured Firefox for AI, I got to choose my LLM of choice. I chose Claude. Now, if I select some text, I get a context menu option that says “Ask Anthropic Claude”, which branches into these options:
Notice the last one? That’s not a “buried” option. That’s as front and center as the options to use it. Mind you, if I decide to not use it, then nothing happens. The only thing that’s changed is that I now have an optional shortcut for LLM features that open in a sidebar instead of a new tab.
Oh, the humanity.